Daniel Obrove: Magician, scholar, adventurer. So the legends claim, the young man graduated from his homeworld's esteemed college of magic and went on to reclaim the ancient art of creating cross-dimensional portals. The legends claim that he never told anyone on his home plane about his discovery, instead endeavoring to privately tour the multiverse without the backing of any external institutions. The legends...get a little muddled after that point, listing a series of contradictory and branching paths that the mage Obrove's life could have possibly taken.
It's almost as though there's something larger at play here, hm?
That or whoever's archiving the legends is high off his rocker.
This story follows a Daniel Obrove shortly after his learning about the aforementioned portal magic. The mage had spent a few years abroad, exploring realities both different and not-so-different from his own, expanding his repertoire of spells through various tutors, and on occasion narrowly avoiding a few disastrous mishaps. The mage grew homesick. Even though he had learned much by leaving home, he was sure there were still more aspects of his native magic to explore.
Daniel planned to return to the place he had been born, Wisteria Duchy, found within the sovereign borders of the Wisterian Empire on Planet Wisteria, located in Rudimentary Medieval Fantasy Universe LV714. Both the province, the empire, and the planet had received their names from the prevailing dynasty of humans that ruled a majority of the planet’s largest continent (Also called Wisteria. Cartographers had a hell of a time keeping track of things). The universe’s name was something Daniel had learned from another multiversal wanderer. Daniel didn’t consider his homeworld medieval, and it was certainly more real to him than fantasy, but he took the traveller’s word for it. At least it was a better name than the one assigned by most local preternatural philosophers. They just referred to the cosmos as Wisteria.
So Daniel came back to his small cottage outside Wisteria Duchy within the Wisterian Empire on the planet Wisteria in Universe LV714, and from there he traveled to his old stomping grounds, the renowned college of magic which served as the crown jewel of the empire.
Daniel was excited to see what new developments had come about during his absence, but as he found out, not a lot had changed. Magic had failed to progress at all during Daniel's years abroad. There were no new spells being practiced, no new advanced branches or specializations of the craft. Advanced pyromancy only lead to bigger fireballs, rather than, say, manipulating ambient temperatures in a wide area. Healing magic was completely uninspired; no one had yet considered using magic to permanently alter a body in order to prevent injuries in the first place. Daniel believed that the worst offense was that summoners still believed that their thralls came from only a few distinct realms, when the reality was that summoning magic drew upon hundreds of different universes, some of which Daniel had visited himself. Demons came from a hell, celestials from one of the heavens, and squamous gibbering abominations from any number of lost sunken kingdoms.
Wisteria’s magical community was still practicing the same old concentrations with an overall hesitation toward trying anything new. Daniel was by no means an expert in any of his home plane's magic, but he could find variants of the various specializations in similar realities, the difference being that those places generally had additional magic to learn beyond the typical fare. Each new world he visited usually bore some unique and nuanced magic of its own. This wasn’t the case for Daniel’s dimension of origin.
Seeing the stagnation that was taking place got the young man thinking. Daniel Obrove's world had nothing more to offer him, but maybe it was time he paid it back for starting him off on his journey. Maybe it was at last time to share his findings with his sorcerous peers. He approached the dean of the school and asked to be allowed to hold a special lecture before the leading members of faculty. Daniel got straight to the point, starting the talk by casting the spell that created a dimensional portal. The stone edifice erupted from the floor right behind the lecture hall’s dais, and when it blinked to life, the assembled wizards saw beyond it mirror images of themselves.
Without speaking, Daniel passed through the portal.
Without speaking, he passed back into the room.
And then he passed into the room again. There were now two Daniel Obroves facing the crowd of senior mages.
He brought Head Thaumaturge Phineas Felis with him, even as he was sitting among the crowd of other magicians. The dean of the school followed next. Soon, the lecture hall was filled with twice as many wizards as it had started. Together, Daniel Obrove and his analogue from the parallel Wisteria explained the truth of the multiverse to their teachers. Daniel hoped that, armed with the ability to visit other dimensions, a new age of magical expansion would take place on his world.
Confident that he had set events in motion that would lead to his universe becoming a lot more interesting in a few centuries, Daniel endeavored to continue his extradimensional sojourn. His departure was delayed, however, when he received a missive from the mysterious Order of the Veil, a society of magic users dedicated to exploring the deeper nature of the world, the universe, and anything beyond. Since Daniel’s demonstration at the college only a few days before, the Order now had the Hither and Thither to treat as a new matter of study. Before they began broadening their research with multiversal travels of their own, the Order of the Veil had a project that they believed Daniel was qualified to assist with.
The usual avenues of inquiry didn’t have much more to offer them. The Order still had questions to ask, and they were running out of methods by which to ask them. How did the universe begin? What allowed the use of magic? What was the nature of the gods? They had conducted countless experiments, but nothing yielded satisfactory solutions. The members of the Order knew through Daniel that there were other universes filled to the brim with diverse forms of life, but their primary concern remained their own universe. They needed to know all they could about their reality before they could really begin delving into others. Maybe the realms beyond Daniel’s portals would provide them with further answers, but the Order had one last experiment to attempt.
It was time to assume a direct approach in deriving the nature of the world. To solve the questions they still had, the Order of the Veil intended to ask the universe itself.
The Order had developed a ritual that they believed would coalesce the fundamental essence of their universe into a tangible, perceivable, conscious entity. Once it was created, the being would be able to answer their questions about the universe because...it would be the universe. The ritual combined many different schools of magic, from alchemy to the study of the divine, and it was Daniel Obrove’s proven proficiency in summoning magic that prompted the Order to call on him. What they intended to accomplish wasn’t necessarily a summoning, but the ritual included enough aspects of one that Daniel’s presence would prove helpful.
On a clear, starry night, members of the Order of the Veil assembled the ritual components, Daniel Obrove checking and double-checking where he could. At midnight exactly, the sorcerous collect gathered around the circle of binding, and together rallied their energies and cast the spell. In the center of the circle appeared a blue-ish mist, its composition displaying familiar patterns of stars, some of which could even be seen above the group of mages. Slowly, the mist seemed to solidify and take a human shape, its skin and robes still reflecting the night sky.
When the Order’s creation became fully manifest, the lead magician called out to it, asked it its name. What would this creature, this mouthpiece of the cosmos, call itself? Wisteria? Rudimentary Medieval Fantasy Universe LV714? The hope and expectation was that it wouldn’t have a name, that it would allow the Order to grant it the same name as the organization’s founder. But perhaps it would reject any names given to it. The monickers given to the universe were the fabrications of mortals, after all. Who could expect something that was infinite to trouble itself with labels? There was a long silence. For something that was infinite, the creature seemed to have to think really hard about its answer.
Jex, the being replied. The infinite universe called itself Jex. And it was very uncooperative.
It turned out that Jex, despite being the universe, didn’t have a very sound knowledge of its workings. Or an adequate grasp of language. The Order found their task changed to teaching Jex, rather than learning from it. When it finally seemed familiar enough with the basics of communication, it didn’t have very good answers about the universe’s nature. Most of the answers Jex gave were framed in riddle or were the same two-digit numerical value, if not a shrugging of the shoulders.
After months of questioning, the Order was ready to abandon the project, but there was still the question of what to do with Jex. They couldn’t dismiss it; the Order of the Veil discovered that they had been too successful creating an embodiment of the universe. Jex was their reality, and to get rid of it meant destroying everything. They couldn’t let it free. Jex came with a personality as well as a name, and that personality was childish and prone to mischief. Something with that temperament and that level of power posed too much risk to simply set free. They considered keeping it in stasis, but that too risked potentially harming the universe which they called home. Yes, they could always relocate to other universes now, but the Order wasn’t so apathetic as to damn billions of people.
Eventually, the Order settled on assigning Jex a caretaker. That way, it would have someone to look after it while also not risking damage to reality by remaining bound. Jex had shown a certain proclivity toward Daniel Obrove, who had delayed his departure once again in order to observe Jex’s interrogation. The Order of the Veil set the Starchild free, expecting the free-wheeling creature to gravitate towards Daniel. It did. Jex was still prone to wandering and causing mischief, but it always eventually returned to Daniel, which the Order believed was as good a solution as any. The being was out of their hair, and kept somewhat safe and under control.
Daniel Obrove suddenly found himself playing babysitter to an entire universe. Their relationship is somewhere between a wizard and his familiar and the hapless servant of a mad deity. Daniel doesn’t mind Jex’s shenanigans too much. The Starchild provides a sense of near-constant companionship during his travels, as well as a subject of study. The Order might have given up on Jex, but Daniel has a feeling that the entity knows more than it let on. Daniel is happy to have Jex tag along so long as it means he can continue to study his own universe even as he’s exploring others.
Daniel Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the neophyte cosmic horror, Obe. He is not the creature's evolved form, its bonded master, or a close acquaintance. He's the Dan who has shared his multiversal awareness with his home plane and then went on to take his home plane on his adventures in the multiverse, whereas Obe is merely trying to eke out a living and not get kicked across the room.
Additionally, this Obrove is not the same as the younger Daniel Obrove you may have seen getting into shenanigans. Their timelines run parallel to each other, rather than consecutively. This Obrove is one possible, close future for the young man, but he is one which the young man has yet to achieve. Savvy?
Other Obroves, younger by a couple years or older by countless centuries, can be found on their alt list, here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!